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Finding a way to be yourself in a professional environment

by | Mar 9, 2015 | Business, career, Communication, Personal branding, real life stuff | 0 comments

Back in September, I did a talk for a group of students at a university where one of my long-time friends is an administrator. The email below is from one of the students who attended the talk and references a comment that I made about my friend during my remarks. Her questions were more generally about presence and demeanor and how one can be him- or herself in a professional environment.

I probably went overboard on the Consultant-esque structure for my response, but I hope that the message came across well for her.

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ND wrote:

Marquis,

I truly enjoyed meeting you last Sunday at [my university] and wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us students about your perspectives.

I had to leave before I got a chance to ask my question, so when you do get the chance, I would love to hear back from you.

After you mentioned that you saw [one of my own long-time friends] acting as a professional as a 16-year old and you decided that you had to start behaving professionally, I expected you to have a formal demeanor and act all sophisticated. So what was it that allowed you to continue being casual, moreover, being yourself even as a top-level professional. And was it hard to find that balance from becoming a corporate robot and from staying true to yourself?

Thanks,

ND

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My response:

Hi ND,

Thanks for taking the time to attend my session over the weekend. I never know if my style and content are right for the audience, so emails like this do a lot to put me at ease. Thanks for reaching out.

You know…in all the years that I’ve been giving talks and connecting with young people, I think that this is the first time that I’ve been asked a question like yours in the way that you asked it. I’m going to have fun responding to this one.

I’m probably going to be to framework-focused on this, but I think that this sort of approach will help in explaining my thought process in a way that you can implement for yourself. I see the key steps involved as follows:

  • Understanding the need to change: Many people (including myself many years ago) don’t have the self-awareness to know that there are opportunities to improve themselves in areas like professional presence and communication. Coming to this realization is key because, otherwise, there would be no sort of movement at all. When it comes to one’s business presence, he/she would need to look around and pick up on standards, customs, and social cues that people tend to employ in a professional environment. Once those items are identified, the person has to take an honest look at him- or herself and ask whether he/she is meeting that standard. If not, then there’s a need to make tweaks of some kind.

  • Determining the right changes to make and how to make them: Once a person has seen that he/she needs to change, the next task is to hone in on the specific things that require fixes. For me, it was a factor of overall presence. It was obvious that I was smart, but my natural demeanor was so casual that there was no way that I could be taken seriously in a professional environment. Next, you have to find incremental ways to change things here and there to eventually get yourself to the right place to meet the standard of professional presence and behavior that you see around you. This is not too hard of a task if the gap between where you are and where you want to be isn’t too large. But, if it’s a major difference between the two, it can be a Herculean feat to make it happen. For me, it took a LOT of work and a long time, but it was well worth it in the end.

  • Finding the confidence to inject a healthy dose of the “Real Me” into the “Professional Me” (which is much more difficult than one would expect): It may take a good amount of work to get yourself to the “right” professional standard, but you may eventually start to feel that you aren’t being yourself. This is when you should find ways to incorporate traits/behaviors that are unique to you into your professional persona. The key will be for you to select things that help you to feel comfortable without violating the accepted standards of business behavior and presence. This isn’t the sort of thing that you’ll be able to do immediately upon entering a new environment though. You’ll have to go in and show that you’re a high performer and/or let people get to know you as a positive asset prior to making these tweaks to insert components of the “Real You” into the “Professional You”.

Of course, I should acknowledge that I’m still a work in progress when it comes to the way that I carry myself in a professional setting. I’ll always be committed to being authentically me, but I’m still tweaking my approach to arrive at a steady state “sweet spot” for that. Sometimes, I’m 100% spot-on with it and, at other times, I notice myself getting too casual for a given environment. I recognize that I will have to work on this constantly over time because my natural state is to be so laid-back in whatever environment that surrounds me…for better or for worse.

That’s about it. I hope that my comments above are helpful as you continue to chart your path through the college experience. Take care and have a great day.

Marquis